Anyone who practices project management for a living will recognize this list. It’s certainly not unique to big data analytics project. It is however reasonable to ask whether “big data” projects are unique in some way that exacerbates the probability of failure.

Still, knowing that data exist – which is what the inventories will tell us — is not the same as accessing and interpreting the data. Even assuming the public eventually gains access to the inventoried data, we’ll still need contextual information about the programs described by the data and measurement of the impacts these programs have.

What we don’t know from the Post article is why anyone would defend useless reports. Are they really useless? Does someone still find them useful? Have they turned into consultants’ and staff employment programs? Or would the programs being reported on feel “slighted” if a congressionally mandated report were no longer required?

As a project manager in the number of organizations where regularization of processes in both projects and non-project situations has always been sought, the most important thing to understand is why the work is being done and to communicate this to the individual worker.

In “IT governance is killing innovation” Andrew Horne and Brian Foster argue that IT project selection needs to move beyond traditional capital investment based ROI measures. The authors think it is more appropriate to take into account project support for critical business capabilities and that such a focus will be much more supportive of innovation.

In Agile grows up and new challenges emerge author Rick Freedman points out what project managers, sooner or later, learn from the School of Hard Knocks: changing and improving project management practices to improve the likelihood of project success involves not just improved management methods but also cultural changes within the sponsoring organization.

Collaboration can be messy. Convincing a group of people to work together to accomplish a common objective, especially when the group contains many people that don’t know each other, requires artful leadership.